Trail junkies sign up early for Wilderness Skills Institute

A 10-day workshop in May will cover everything you need to know to join trail crews on overnight expeditions in Wilderness Areas.

The Wilderness Skills Institute will be held May 19-30 at the Cradle of Forestry in Pisgah National Forest. It is hosted jointly by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards, The Wilderness Society), and the United States Forest Service.

The workshop is designed for trail volunteers, forest rangers and nonprofits who help build and maintain trails in Wilderness Areas. Topics will include including Wilderness First Aid, Leave No Trace, crosscut saw, tool care, building trail structures, rigging to stabilize and move heavy objects, and a trail maintenance course that emphasizes hands on instruction on the theory and skills to maintain and repair wilderness trails.

A course will also be offered for Wilderness rangers focusing on history, policy, law, field safety, Leave No Trace, and recreation use monitoring among other topics. All tracks come together for discussions of Wilderness theory and legislation with some of the nation’s most experienced stewards.

Reading Room

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

We live in an age — the relativity of truth — in which Orwell’s adage seems as dated as monocles or top hats. Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution led to Social Darwinism, a philosophy pitting one human being against another with survival of the fittest as the supreme law for success, so Einstein’s theory of relativity changed popular philosophy and cultural mores as radically as it did the study of physics.

This Must Be the Place

Outside the Tipping Point Brewing windows on Main Street, heavy snowflakes cascaded upon downtown Waynesville last Wednesday night. Cars cautiously cruised through the intersection, with the snowfall increasing as the minutes ticked by.